Nadege Meriau

NADEGE MERIAU

Meriau experimental practice is principally photographic, but encompasses installation and performance-based work. Best known for her use of organic matter - bread, chicken carcasses, honeycomb - her visceral and sensuous imagery both seduces and disorientates. Spaces are ambiguous and scale is distorted. For each piece the artist exercises both control and restraint, manipulating and coaxing her materials into certain behaviours or forms, whilst simultaneously allowing nature to take its course.

Meriau was shortlisted for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Conran Award in 2011, nominated for the Arts Foundation Fellowship 2012, the Arles Prix Decouverte 2012 and more recently the Prix Pictet 2014. Her photographic works are held in public and private collections in the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands.

"Central to my practice are the concepts of home and dwelling, which I explore through the psychological, social or non-human realms. How do I root myself in a space, a community? How do I define, and push the boundaries, of my creative territory, my cultural identity? Drawing on scientific and philosophical theory, classic and sci-fi literature, the history of art and architecture, I continually seek to stretch the boundaries of photography, investigating its relationship with painting, sculpture and architecture."